July 9, 2023

Activists for reparations have been inundating Americans with a larger-than-life version of Black history, while historical comparisons to other groups inside and outside America are buried. It’s no wonder Americans don’t know that, from the 17th to 20th century, America’s unprecedented diversity was considered a vulnerable point of failure. It took hard work to bring together a unified American population, work that leftists have undermined.

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Even today, many nations teeter on the verge of failure or experience diminished success because their governments find diverse populations troublesome. One policy prescription is to engage in ethnic or ideological “cleansing.” (See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

Indeed, were it not for other nations ousting disfavored populations, America might be as ethnically homogenous as North Korea or Rwanda. Instead, immigrants, from African slaves to free Irish to indentured Italians, ended in America when their own governments engaged in ethnic, tribal, and religious cleansing to restore their own population’s homogeneity. America became the Mother of Exiles, welcoming other nations’ “wretched refuse,” but it was a very caveated welcome.

In time, America built a peaceful and prosperous nation on unprecedented racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. Then it did one better. It became the world’s leading anti-racist nation, supporting the most successful minorities in the world. This is America’s greatest achievement and one that helped uplift the rest of the world. Once Americans understand this unique history, leftists will no longer be able to exploit their ignorance of and guilt for slavery and Jim Crow.

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Some know that the first step in African slavery was for the slaves’ countrymen to capture them for sale to African, Arab, European, and Asian buyers for labor elsewhere. But few know that, from 1607-1924, most immigrants who came to America, no matter their race, came because their countrymen forced them out.

Public domain image from an 1868 Boston want ad.

In the 19th. century, millions of desperate Irish, Jews, and Italians were forced to emigrate to America’s eastern seaboard. For three centuries, English Protestants had tried to squeeze Irish Catholics out of Ireland, finally succeeding with the Irish Potato Famine, which was essentially a genocide by famine. The Russian Empire saw Jews as a deviant race and began cleansing them. Meanwhile, exploited and desperate southern Italian ethnicities were deemed to be “scientifically” inferior, and their government urged them to emigrate. In the new western states, economic conditions forced hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Japanese to come for work.

Tribal ethnicity (as opposed to race) and religion remained the primary targets of cleansing. Ninety-nine percent of genocide victims and genocidaires were of the same race. Slavery has lingered in Africa and Asia, despite being officially abolished in most regions. Former slaves and their descendants remained perpetually tarred with a slave identity.

From 1800-1924, tens of millions of non-Protestant, uneducated, poor, destitute immigrants took voyages that, until the mid-19th century, were as perilous as any slave ship to America. In 1865, after the Civil War definitively ended black chattel slavery in America, four million American-born blacks competed with the wretched refuse of the world for jobs and other resources. Discrimination between immigrants and Americans and between immigrants and immigrants was reflexive and pervasive.

Every group faced “need not apply” signs, slurs, and over-policing. Severe hatred against the Irish Catholics drove illegal deportations. Anti-Catholic mobs torched convents and churches, sometimes with parishioners inside. The government condoned the inhumane treatment of thousands of Italians toiling as illegal indentured servants. The KKK targeted blacks, Jews, and Catholics, and Jim Crow laws targeted blacks but ensnared many poor whites.

The West’s version of Jim Crow laws affected Asians even more severely than blacks. Laws prevented Asians from owning land and, sometimes, their land was confiscated. Western states weren’t slave states, but they had Native- and Mexican-American debt slaves.